The marketization of church closures

In recent years, the impact of marketization on the religious field has gained increasing attention within sociology of religion. However, one of the recurring issues has been how to define marketization. In this article, I propose a particular theoretical definition focusing on the intertwinement of neoliberalism and New Public Management, and by using Critical Discourse Analysis I find that demands for structural reorganization, i.e., closing churches, in the Diocese of Copenhagen increasingly makes use of the discourse of marketization. I examine the consequences of two municipality reforms from 1970 and 2007 on the Diocese, trying to pinpoint instances of marketization, before analyzing how the issue of church closures becomes the focal point in the structural discussions from 2005 to 2013. By exploring the minutes from the Diocese council, I argue that marketization has become embedded in the institutions within the Church to the point where it has become a cultural dominant.